Entries in Metal
(3)

Today I am releasing the first new Free SFX Download Pack - Bouncing Knives. The pack features the sound of various knives being attached to a wall mounted magnetic board. As the knives fight off the pull of the magnet they vibrate and make a fantastic twanging sound. There is not much to say about the recording process, as this was pretty much a "point and shoot" type of recording session. So I won't blather on in this post about how the knives were recorded. The hardest part of the shoot was pulling out the fridge to unplug it. I did use a great tip I saw last year in a Ric Viers video tutorial that you might be able to learn fro as well. I always forget to go back and plug in any appliances I had to unplug to keep quiet during a recording session. So when I unplugged the fridge I put my car keys inside. This way when I went to leave and my keys were not in my pocket, I was immediately reminded to plug in the refrigerator.

I have found these sounds to be extremely useful in cartoon-y animation projects. They have a familiar Wile E. Coyote type feel to them. I have also used these sounds on knife throw impacts to get a great effect. I think the applications are nearly endless for these sounds.

Below is a video showing the various knives rattling on the magnetic board. I went back later to shoot this video, the actual files available for download allow for proper ring off with each knife.

Feel free to jump over to the Free Downloads page on this site to grab your copy of these great sounds. They are delivered at 24/96 with Soundminer embedded metadata. All I ask in return is that you either follow me on twitter (@azimuthaudio) or subscribe to the RSS feed for this site. This way you can be in the loop when new Free SFX download packs are released.

First off, I have been a little bit neglectful of this blog in the last few weeks. Work has been overwhelmingly busy and has left no time for any new posts. But I have wrapped one of the animated series I had been working on, so there is a bit more free time to be had now. The endless 7 day work weeks are now transforming into solid 5 and a half day work weeks.

If you are in Canada the series I just wrapped, called Crash Canyon created by Joel Cohen (Co-Executive Producer of The Simpsons), started airing last week on Teletoon. It will be showing every Sunday at 9pm, check it out. For those abroad, not including the USA, MTV International has picked up the show, so keep an eye out for it in you area in the coming months. Now back to my regularly scheduled blog posts:

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Here in Toronto there is a big emphasis on recycling cans and plastics. A common problem can happen if you have too many cans and you fill up the recycling bin in a hurry. To solve this issue "can crusher" devices have become more common in recent years. These wall mounted devices use a downward crank to crush pop cans down from around 5 inches in height to less then an inch. This process takes about a half second and requires very little effort as the device generates most of the force for you. If you have never seen one before here is a picture of the filthy one in the shed.

After a family gathering recently I had a large overflowing box of empty beer and soda cans so I went out to the shed to crush them down so they could all fit in the blue box. On my way across the yard I realized that the neighbourhood was especially quiet that night, other then crickets there was no traffic or air conditioners rumbling away. So I decided this would be the night I finally recorded the crusher in action. I set up my Rode NTG3 a few inches from from the device and started crushing away.

Here is a you tube clip of the can crusher in action:

The sound has a pretty great metal ripping sound, I was able to use a bunch of the can crushes in a project with a big car smash up and they worked great. The device also makes a pretty good grinding sound when you raise the crank back up after a crushing. Since I recorded these with with my Sound Devices 702 set at 192k, the sounds are great for drastic pitch manipulation. I was pretty happy with how slowing the recordings down managed to still really keep a nice high frequency presence. In the end there were 28 cans crunched in this session, here is a selection of a few of them at normal speed followed by a bunch pitched down by various amounts.

Recently I took my recording rig with me on a trip to visit my wife's hometown. My father-in-law runs a small sign printing operation out of a converted barn and I thought I could spend some time in the shop recording the various machines. He has been in the printing business for almost 40 years and has some great devices from the pre digital days. Although I got some great stuff from the various kinds of printing press and machines my favourite sound discovery was the drying racks.

As you can see the rack consists of 25 levels of metal trays, each level is spring loaded so it can be lifted upwards to get at the tray beneath it. It works almost like a giant metal book. They are designed so that you can air dry multiple prints at the same time, all stacked on top of each other. The racks are not very loud when listened to normally, but if you place a contact microphone on the rack and listen through it - a whole new world of sound appears.

I have not used any processing on this at all, all the reverb you can hear is the actual rack resonating, and man can it resonate a long time. Just walking near the racks set them off on long slow metallic rings that seemed to last forever.

In this first sample I am simply raising and lowering the 15 racks above the one the contact mic is resting on. It basically becomes a horror film sound track.

The drying rack was originally a stack of 50 individual racks but in order to get it to the second floor of the barn it had to be split into two units of 25 racks each. The second unit sounded similar but had a lot more presence from the actual springs attached to each rack. You can hear the springs "popping" quite a bit in this recording of the second unit.

Another great sound I stumbled upon was simply lightly kicking the bottom of the rack to get this great low metal hit. You can hear a couple at the begining of this clip followed by more grinds of the trays being lowered and raised.